From WikiLeaks

New Assignment: To WikiLeak or Not to Wikileak?

Alex Padalka is a journalist living in New York. He has written for the Queens Tribune and is the editor of Block Magazine and McGraw Hill Construction.

The Wiki movement has a new student in the offing — a group called Wikileaks.org, which plans to apply the concepts behind Wikipedia to whistle-blowing. While the attempt to provide an online outlet to expose corrupt governments and corporations is admirable at first blush, the project is flawed and will be difficult to pull off because of its anonymous nature.

It’s difficult to get past the first stumbling block — the site’s authors remain anonymous. The site’s FAQ states Wikileaks was “founded by Chinese dissidents, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.” Of course, that’s information that cannot be verified. The secrecy and anonymity, which has extended to its relations with the press, has brought on a bloggorhea speculation and accusations.

Before it could publish its first leak, Wikileaks itself was leaked leaked to the press by Cryptome.org writer John Young, a legend in hosting leaked information in his own right who says he refused to sit on Wikileak’s board.

The site has since been accused of intending to fleece the CIA for $5 million (Young suggested going for $100 million instead), and of being a CIA front, or a possible source of disinformation for terrorists. In this climate, odds are the project will not get off the ground unless the founders identify themselves.

But the concept of wiki-leaking is flawed.

Wikileaks takes a two-pronged approach to anonymous leaks the way Wikipedia approaches encyclopedic entries. Leaked documents are posted by anonymous users, whose security Wikileaks assures it can protect, although that too has been questioned. Other users check for “false” or “irresponsible” leaks.

Wikileaks has posted a sample leak (zip file) of an Islamic Republic of Somalia call to arms letter to give a taste of what they can do. Conflicts arose immediately.

Leak Authenticity

Forged leaks are basic tools of the spy trade, and Wikileaks’ acute analysis of its sample leak concludes that the authenticity of the “wikileaked” (there, it’s coined) document cannot be verified, and that leak fabrication by intelligence agencies “is not implausible, and not without precedent.”

It’s the nature of the wiki process to occasionally release errant information, and good journalists or citizen journalists are likely to use Wikileaks in much the same way they use Wikipedia and Google – all the time, but not as a primary source. In this sense WikiLeaks is a tool to raise eyebrows, but not necessarily sound alarms.

A more pressing issue is how releasing all sorts of confidential documents will influence the people the action is supposed to help in the first place. And if Wikileaks’ claim to 1.2 million documents is indeed true – what do you do with them?

Even minimal editorial oversight can prevent Wikileaks from disappearing into irrelevance from too many posts about Hollywood scandals and not enough posts of torture orders. But it would take considerably more to verify accuracy in translations, expose false pretenses, protect potential victims, and monitor anonymous posting in such a way that would preclude offending users from repeatedly posting irresponsible or false information.

Wikileaks is currently recruiting volunteer editors, so “uncensorable” does not mean “unedited.” However, as of this writing the site was scheduled to launch this month or next. There were 1.2 million documents waiting to be Wikileaked, and, according to the latest FAQ, 22 people “directly involved” with Wikileaks (and counting).

By contrast: Wikipedia has “thousands of editors,” “a few hundred administrators with special powers to enforce good behavior,” and an arbitration committee. Can Wikileaks attract and maintain that sort of manpower?

And the major oversight — Wikileaks could be exposing people often very much in danger of physical harm. How many experts outside the intelligence community would be able to “edit for content” a militant Islamic order to target civilians the way a hobbyist can correct a Wikipedia entry on model air plane history?